Brewologist: Red Harvest is mild, not wild

Oct. 18, 2013

Guinness Red Harvest Stout / Submitted photo

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CentralOhio.com

Red Harvest

Brewery: Guinness & Co, Dublin, Ireland (www.guinness.com, @GuinnessIreland on Twitter) Style: Billed as a fall seasonal stout. Notes: Very creamy, very smooth, very mild. Too mild for me. Stats: 4.1 percent alcohol by volume, percent alcohol by volume. Availability: Limited release for fall, but should be easy to find and in good supply.

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The first stout I ever drank was a Guinness.

That’s not unusual, probably, for U.S. beer drinkers who have as many years of experience as I do. These days, wonderful stouts abound, but back in the day Guinness Extra Stout was the one you’d most likely run into at the store or pub, while others were more like surprise discoveries. Often, Guinness was the only real alternative to standard pale lagers in many of the night spots I haunted. I grew to love it, and although I have since then ventured into an ever-expanding beer universe, I’ll still sip a Guinness now and then.

So when a Guinness publicist sent me a can of the brewery’s new Red Harvest Stout, I was enthusiastic. A stout brewed for fall by a brewery that has been making stout since 1759 sounded pretty good to me.

Red Harvest is billed as a smooth stout to celebrate the fall harvest season and the Celtic festival of Samhain. To quote from the can, the festival is held every year on All Hallow’s Eve and “celebrates the end of the fall harvest and the coming of winter. On this night, the believers beckon restless spirits from the darkness with bonfires and sweet offerings from the bountiful harvest.”

The beer came in a can containing a nitrogen widget, so I got out a tall pint glass in order to appreciate the show. Poured straight in as soon as the can was popped open, the brew developed a massive head. A brownish-red cloud of foam swirled inside the glass from near bottom to top, then ever so slowly condensed itself into a cap of thick off-white foam atop a darkly red beer. It was quite beautiful to watch.

Unfortunately, I found watching the beer to be more fun than drinking it. The beer is creamy and smooth, a bit on the sweet side in both aroma and taste — and very, very mild. The silky texture was quite nice, but the flavor did not cut it for me, mostly because there just wasn’t a great deal of it. It was sort of sweet and sort of bready, but without any taste that jumped out and demanded that I take notice, and the only surprise was that it was so mild. There was not much of a hops presence, and not much of a deep, tasty finish. The flavor pretty much vanished right after the swallow.

The makers offered it up as an alternative to all the pumpkin beers out there this time of year, and I’m all for variety, but Red Harvest seems too timid for an autumn brew. I was expecting something more bracing, and got something that reminded me of milk.

The barley here, Guinness says, is lightly roasted. It also, in my opinion, is barely in evidence. I poured this beer cold, as suggested by the brewery, but got little of the caramel and toffee flavors promoted in press materials. Once the beer warmed up to something closer to cellar temperature, the flavors were a bit more willing to show themselves — but even then, Red Harvest proved to be very, very mild.

Your experience will be different from mine, of course; I’m here to tell you what to expect, not what’s good or bad. If you expect a nice big dry stout, you likely will be disappointed. If you want a walk on the mild side, Red Harvest may well be what you’re looking for.

As for me, I’ll have another Guinness, please, but make it a Foreign Extra Stout. Red Harvest is not enough to conjure this restless spirit from the darkness in search of another drink.